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Curated by Olga Sviblova, the collective’s interpretation of Satyricon, a work by Roman poet Gaius Petronious Arbiter, features a nine channel video installation of a hotel resort paradise threatened by disaster. The artists’ website states:

the atmosphere of ‘The Feast of Trimalchio’ can be seen as bringing together the hotel rituals of leisure and pleasure … On the other hand the ‘servants’ are more than attentive service-providers. They are participants in an orgy, bringing to life any fantasy of the ‘masters’.

The show, which runs from 19 June to 29 August, features both the video installation as well as several brand new, never-before-seen panoramic digital collages.

Daria Zhukova’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow is closed for renovations until February 2009 when it will reopen with Christie’s owner Francois Pinault’s exhibition of his personal collection. In the meantime Zhukova is showing an exhibiton of 12 video art on outdoor jumbotron screens (normally used for advertisements) in Moscow.

“Fashion designer and It-Girl Dasha Zhukova’s nonprofit Garage Center for Contemporary Culture has rarely been out of the art-world spotlight since it opened this September. Now, her exhibition space in the former bus depot is making an open-air assault on Moscow’s public with a monthlong exhibition of video art on a giant screen over the Mosenergo power plant.

The clips that make up “Moscow on the MOVE,” which began showing last Saturday, were handpicked by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, co-director of exhibitions and programs at London’s trendy Serpentine Gallery. Videos by twelve artists and filmmakers from around the world will be shown in groups for a week each and then replaced by new 50-minute segments.

The project, based on a similar Olbrist venture in Seoul in 2000, is conceived not as a film to be screened but as a part of the city itself. “During my first visit, I was struck by the city’s Jumbotrons,” Olbrist wrote in a statement. “Millions of people see them every day. It’s like something out of Blade Runner — facades of buildings interwoven with giant billboards of moving images.”

For this new-media venture, Olbrist has selected a who’s who of contemporary video artists. Among the 12 participants are 1996 Turner Prize laureate Douglas Gordon, last year’s Russian representatives at the Venice Biennale the AES+F group and multimedia guru Doug Aitken, who carried off the Golden Lion, one of art’s highest accolades, from the 1999 Biennale. The form’s precursors are also represented, by Dziga Vertov’s 1929 classic “Man with a Movie Camera,” Soviet documentary-maker Artavazd Peleshyan and German new wave legend Alexander Kluge.

Zhukova described the project as an “experiment — an unusual example of contemporary art leaving the confines of traditional museums or exhibition spaces.” Apart from the Russian Museum’s “Art Tour,” in which masterpieces from the collection were literally hung up on the street, and the now-defunct “Empty” video festival on Tverskoi Bulvar, there has indeed been little in the way of “outside art” in the city. “It’s a way of bringing art to everyone,” she added.

“This is the first of its kind for Moscow, this is the
first time that we have a video art project in the middle of the city, in the
open air, so that’s new and exciting, I think there are some artists that
we’ve included in our line-up who haven’t done anything formally in Russia so
that’s also definitely something people will be excited to see,” said
Dasha.

Daria Zhukova’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture drew comparisons to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art and London’s Tate Modern when it opened in a vast, reconstructed garage last month.But the Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, an architectural landmark, is far from a permanent accommodation and will have to be vacated in two years to allow for the construction of the Russian-Jewish Museum of Tolerance.

“Daria’s center is absolutely temporary,” said Timor Kireyev, a spokesman for the Federation of Jewish Communities, which holds the lease on the building. “We never turned the lease of the building over to her. We allowed her to use the space.”

Several media outlets, including The New York Times, have reported that Zhukova has taken over the lease.

How Zhukova won the right to use the space for her art museum is a complicated tale of Russian bureaucracy and good ties — in this case the fact that her boyfriend, billionaire Roman Abramovich, is chairman of the Federation of Jewish Communities’ board of trustees.

In 2001, the Moscow city government granted the 8,500-square-meter garage, built by constructivist architect Konstantin Melnikov to the Federation of Jewish Communities, on the condition that it create a cultural and educational complex on the property. The government still owns the property.

Following massive reconstruction work on the building — expected to begin in late 2009 — the garage will become home to the Russian-Jewish Museum of Tolerance, said Alexander Boroda, the executive director of the Federation of Jewish Communities.

Although a press release issued by the gallery included two short paragraphs devoted to the history of the garage, neither the building’s future as a Jewish museum nor its connection to the Federation was mentioned.

Messages left at Zhukova’s London press office were not returned. A Moscow spokesperson for Garage said it is unclear where the Center will move when construction work for the museum begins.

Zhukova, 27, is the daughter of an oil tycoon and girlfriend of Abramovich, one of Russia’s wealthiest men.

The billionaire sponsored Garage’s first major event, last month’s exhibition by renowned emigre artists Emilia and Ilya Kabakov. How much funding he contributed is undisclosed.

The Federation had already made plans with the Kabakovs to host their retrospective in the garage before Zhukova had expressed an interest in creating an art center there, according to Baruch Gorin, the organization’s press secretary.

“It was on our initiative that Garage opened the exhibit,” he said. “We weren’t prepared to fund and organize the event and so we approached her to take the project over.”

Several sources close to the Federation say the deal allowing Zhukova to use the space temporarily was worked out between Abramovich and Alexander Boroda, the executive director of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia, behind closed doors.

Dasha Zhukova is to open a contemporary art space in the Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, a giant red-brick Constructivist-era landmark near the Olympic Stadium in Moscow. Popular with architects the garage was designed in 1926 by Konstantin Melnikov.

“I thought Moscow should have a space like this for contemporary art,” Zhukova said. “There is a huge thirst for knowledge among the younger generation for contemporary art, but most of them learn about it by going on the Internet.”

Under its new name the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture this 92,000 square foot space will open next month and its first show will be a retrospective of the artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.

Zhukova herself acknowledges being a relative art neophyte. “I didn’t study art history and don’t remember names of artists,” she said. “But if I like an image, I remember it.”

Born in Moscow in 1981, Zhukova is an only child. Her parents divorced when she was young, and when her mother, a molecular biologist, took a job at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the early 1990s, they moved there. Zhukova spoke not a word of English. But she quickly adjusted, she said, attending schools in Los Angeles and then the University of California, Santa Barbara.

A year ago few people in the art world had heard of her.

Zhukova said she isn’t modeling the Garage Center after any specific museum. “I’m taking different aspects of different institutions that are inspiring influences,” she said.

Besides aid from Abramovich, financing is also coming from other private sources and corporations. Admission will be free.

After the Kabakov exhibition that opens next month, the Garage Center plans to exhibit works from the collection of Christie’s owner, the luxury goods magnate François Pinault, whose foundation is based in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Dent-Brocklehurst said she was considering commissioning artists to create site-specific works for the space, analogous to installations in the vast Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern.

Asked if the Garage would have its own collection, Zhukova said that would be many years down the road, if ever.”For now I’m trying to learn as much as I can to make up for my lack of art history,” she said. “The more I read, the more I realize what I don’t know.”